2 LE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES Public Health Service

 

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National Institutes of Heaith
Bethesda, Maryland 20892

JUN 2 4 1999

Michael |. Goldberg, Ph.D.
Executive Director

American Society for Microbiology
1325 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20005-4171

Dear Dr. Goldberg:

This is in response to your May 25 letter to Secretary Donna Shalala and the American
Society for Microbiology’s May 24 letter to me. Your comments on the draft proposal
for E-biomed are welcome and raise interesting issues. However, perhaps due to some
ambiguity in the proposal draft, your response appears to contain some misconceptions
regarding E-biomed. As a prelude to the meeting we have recently scheduled with your
Society's representatives, | would like to clarify and expand on some of the issues you
raise and also refer you to an addendum to the May 5 draft, written in light of the
discussions and correspondence to date, which will soon be posted on my Web site.

First, E-biomed will not be a Government-funded, Government-run entity. In order to
fulfill its potential, E-biomed needs to be an endeavor in which the international
scientific community participates, with representation of all interested parties on the
Governing Board. We have been discussing a partnership with the European
Molecular Biology Organization and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which
would internationalize the project and allow technical matters to be developed jointly
between the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology
Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. We hope that organizations
from other parts of the world will also become E-biomed partners.

While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is committed to providing initial funding for
E-biomed, we do not envision the NIH as the sole funding source for running E-biomed
in the long term. The future funding is obviously a complex issue that requires further
discussion with partner organizations, potential funding sources, and publishers in
particular. Some possibilities for raising this money include contributions from partner
organizations, article submission charges (with exemption policies), advertising, and
donations from industrial and private sources.

We acknowledge the willingness of scientific society publishers to adapt and change to
online publishing. The strides taken by editors and publishers to convert their journals
into electronic format and add electronic adjuncts have been well received. But at
Page 2 - Michael |. Goldberg, Ph.D.

present, an individual or institution must either subscribe or negotiate a site license in
order to access the electronic version of each journal or cluster of journals. In E-
biomed, all prospective readers would be able to freely access any component of the
system. This is a fundamental difference between our proposal and the practices of the
current publishing system.

So that we can maintain the standards of science publishing to which we have all grown
accustomed, we hope to encourage existing journals to participate in E-biomed. They
would do this by contributing peer-reviewed research articles to the repository. This
would create a choice of routes for depositing articles in E-biomed, as well as a filtering
mechanism for readers. One route to submitting an article would be directly to the
repository; this type of article would be publicly available after passing a basic
screening process only. The other route would be to submit an article to a participating
journal in the conventional manner. Such an article would only become available for
public viewing after satisfying the criteria set out by the reviewers and editors of that
journal. This may require that, in time, societies would need to invoke new financing
models in order to recover their publishing costs. However, we believe that the benefits
of participation--providing access to the whole breadth of the scientific literature for all--
is a very strong incentive for societies to participate in E-biomed.

Sincerely,

fen {lcene—

Harold Varmus, M.D.
Director